Shanghai Surprise

I'm tackling Shanghai last because I'm still trying to get to grips with my feelings about the place.

On face value - which if we are to be frank is a lot of what Shanghai's about - it's an amazing city. The best restaurants, great shopping, fantastic nightlife (I assume), allegedly pretty girls (my dad kept saying: "You know, Shanghai girls have such lovely figures but they look sooo ugly"), some great art deco style buildings, a futuristic cityscape in the form of Pudong, a fascinating history especially around the colonial era...

But all my earlier rants about Chinese people basically stemmed from my first impressions of Shanghai. The pushing, the smells, the rudeness, the arguments (people say that Shanghainese sounds like the people are arguing all the time - err, that's because they are), the dirt... down where my dad lived the cheap outdoor restaurants simply threw the left over rubbish out on the street with no bags...okay no need to go down that road again - not till the end of this blog entry anyhow.

So, let me point out a few fab things that I did get to do here:

- firstly: I ate for England. There's something not quite right about Chinese food in Thailand so I made sure I stocked up in Shanghai. My top 3 meals were

1) Guyi (see picture below): spicy Hunanese cuisine - wicked food. Of course it's going to be spicy but every dish we had tasted different. Beef ribs cooked with peppers in a wok was firey, dry fried beans was gorgeous and coupled with some steamed silver and gold buns which you eat dipped in a sweet carnation milk sauce: awesome.



2) Dongbeiren: north eastern country food. My friend & his family took us there and it was wonderful. The fried aubergines are something I will never forget. Plus the whole place is decorated in the bright red or green cloth with prints of peonies and peacocks. Even the waitresses' mary jane shoes are ringed with the stuff.
3) Mongolian hot pot: yep, it's 30 degrees centigrade outside, but who cares, a bubbing copper hotplate, a dish of raw lamb, sesame/soya sauce dip and bob is your uncle!

- secondly: I shopped. Went to the cloth market at Dongjiadu Road and got some tops made. I'd have brought over all my favourite clothes for them to copy if I'd known about the place before I packed. Bought DVDs etc. Nuff said really. We've come a long way since the automatic 'mei you's response to any request starting with 'do you have...?' back in 1990 when bkkmei was bjmei for the first time.

- thirdly, love the old architecture. Just observing the former posh western houses, the buildings that look like they're from the Garment district in New York, the Bund - it's very impressive. And there's the twist: that nice terraced house which wouldn't look out of place in Belgium has a zillion bamboo poles out with clothes drying on them.



What a pity they're all being knocked down.



I'm going to accept that Shanghai will never be my favourite place in China. I've always been more of a Beijing girl having studied there. When I started my China trip my dad and my friend had to help me out. Having spent the last few months learning Thai, my mandarin was crap. And I didn't have the gall to attract attention to get proper service. I mean waving your arm manically around shouting 'qing wen!!' is just not done in Thailand!

But what I hated about Shanghai was the person it made me become towards the end of the trip. My dad - over 80 - was already dashing into underground carriages in a vain attempt to get a seat because he knew nobody would give up theirs for him. Admittedly he looks 20 years younger but still. And I would take to very deliberately saying please and thank you - just to embarrass whoever was serving me into being polite back. But on our trip back from Suzhou, we found this man (I'll be frank, he was a peasant) and his young son sitting in our seats and I really screamed at them to get the hell off. They scurried off. His wife and other son were sitting opposite. Later on, this dominmatrix train guard shouted at the wife to get her son measured up to see how tall he was for ticketing purposes. Watching this wife squirming in her reluctance to get her son measured was heartbreaking. They were obviously very poor and I guess the extra whatever kwai for the ticket meant a lot to them.

And there I had been, screaming at her husband. This is what I had become after one week in China. Thank god I am back in Thailand.